I shudder every time I think of how close I got to using emulation. How, for a few days, my mind was set on mailing a guy ten bucks for a CD with every NES game ever on it. Let me explain.
I found out about eBay this January. The first thing that I wanted to buy there was an NES system, with my old one dead and no longer at my house. But then, somehow, I stumbled upon a guy selling emulation disks for ten bucks. My mind went back and forth. My friends at school were all for it. "Go for the emulation," they said. "You know you want to save all that money." But something inside me knew that it wasn't right. And so I set off to be the winning bidder on an NES system. Emulation is a betrayal of Nintendo, and that is not what I intend to do.
However, emulation is a powerful force. It doesn't take a genius to figure that out. Look at the amount of NES sites on the web. Then look at the amount of emulation sites. There is an alarming difference. Why do people use emulation?
For many reasons. Emulation is cheap. Games cost...nothing. Emulation is easy. You get games off of your computer, and you get them almost instantly. Emulation is hassle-free. No more jiggling the cartridge to get it to work. But there is one thing that emulation is not; that emulation will never be.